I’ve been on holiday this week and so mostly I’ve been tweeting about blackberries.
Here’s a secret: I don’t really like blackberries. I’m not lying in that thread; I have eaten probably a thousand of them while I’ve been away. But I’m not a fan unless it’s in this specific context; a frenzied ten day window of plucking them right off the bush. And even then it can be hit or miss. Some plants are just the right mix of tart and sweet, while others are completely tasteless or bitter. This year I’ve gotten better at guessing from the look of them, but also this hasn’t stopped me from downing handfuls of the bad ones because, you know, it’s blackberry season.
A few days before blackberry season started over here I saw this TikTok:
Aside from um, sorry? not my favourite fruit just growing out of everywhere being practically Shakespearean in its use of iambic pentameter, it really captures the surprise. Like, yeah, this happens every year, but um, sorry?
I know how to reliably forage a few things, but blackberries are the only ones that are quite like this. You don’t have to go out into the hills or forest like you do for bilberries and mushrooms. Blackberries grow in every carpark. You don’t even have to do anything to prepare them like hazelnuts and nettles.
And because of that, I keep stumbling over the lack of transaction. They’re obviously free in monetary terms, but they’re also free in terms of effort. This feels kind of like a capitalist-specific brainrot, where everything has to have a price, but it’s not only that. One of my favourite writers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, says in her essay Returning The Gift:
I’ve been told that my Potawatomi ancestors taught that the job of a human person is to learn, “What can I give in return for the gifts of the Earth?”
Her answer to the question is that we can pay attention.
Wall Kimmerer writes with great sadness about how few people can name their local plants and trees. This is something that I sometimes feel self conscious about, particularly when I’m with my dad, who’s a trained botanist. This week, while we were walking across this non-descript (to me!) bit of grass, they started getting super animated about a flower half the size of my little finger called Autumn lady’s tresses, only they called it spiranthis spiralis because that’s how they talk. I took a little video, though this went on for probably 20 minutes.
The thing about my dad, though, is that they will sometimes act like knowing more plants equals living a more fulfilling life. Like this week they were like don’t you think it’s sad that most people don’t know you can eat wood sorrel? They weren’t even eating wood sorrel, although there was plenty of it around and I kept stopping to pick it, so they easily could have. They just thought it was inherently a worse life to never know this.
I will never be able to name little bits of grass. I had never even heard of all three of the plants that they point out in that 50 second clip, even though they do this all the time so I have picked up quite a few plant names in my life.
But!
Everyone has their own wood sorrel. We would be driving and we could only get Radio 1 and my dad would be like I don’t understand this modern music on account of being 59 years old and I would be like some people who love this music will think that your life is less rich because of that like you do with wood sorrel except I didn’t say that because I didn’t think of it in time.
I don’t think that everyone’s lives would be improved by knowing what the hell autumn gentian is. You could just as easily look to a the music of Radio 1, or an obscure kind of number puzzle, or learning to juggle instead. I mean, the person I keep thinking about from this week is the one who was clearly thrilled, taking a photo of the specific construction of a picnic bench.
And while there is something to be said for developing an appreciation of the natural world given the urgency of the climate crisis, I don’t think it has to be grand. As the TikTok says, the blackberries are everywhere. As they say, that fact is an inherent counter to a certain kind of hostile doomerism, but it’s also an inherent counter to the idea that you need to pay back the Earth with your undivided attention. Sometimes you only have to look to the end of the concrete.